Gail Herriot is Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law and a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights since 2007. She is a conservative, so much of the civil rights racket (“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Eric Hoffer) objects to her existence.
Herriot recently posted the following jaw-dropping letter that she received from a member of the California Bar:
Dear Ms. Heriot,This letter serves as a formal cease and desist demand regarding your ongoing, public, and targeted efforts to undermine and harass the Black community and its advocates for equity, in direct violation of state and federal civil rights laws and your ethical obligations as a member of the bar.Your activities—including those publicly associated with the California Foundation for Equal Rights (CFER) (among others) and campaigns explicitly opposing Black-focused equity —constitute racial targeting and harassment under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 1981, and applicable state hate crime and anti-discrimination statutes. Such conduct is not protected expression when it rises to the level of coordinated intimidation or bias-based obstruction of legally protected programs. It is particularly egregious that your public campaigns have focused solely on efforts benefiting the Black community, while remaining silent on or even supportive of state and federal allocations to other racial or ethnic groups.For example: In 2021 and 2022, the State of California directed substantial funding—over $165 million—to AAPI anti-hate initiatives, a commendable effort to address rising hate incidents against Asian Americans.In 2024, the California Legislature authorized over $300 million in support for Holocaust survivors and members of the Jewish community, recognizing their suffering and need for continued support.Despite these allocations, your campaigns have not targeted or criticized these initiatives—only those aimed at repairing centuries of harm done to Black Americans, who remain the most frequent victims of race-based hate crimes nationwide according to federal data. Your selective and racially targeted opposition to Black equity initiatives, combined with your public standing as an attorney, member of a federal civil rights commission and educator, magnifies the discriminatory impact and constitutes a pattern of bias-based harassment under both state and federal law.Accordingly, you are hereby ordered to immediately cease and desist from any further direct or indirect harassment, public misinformation, or racially targeted advocacy directed toward the Black community or programs designed to support it. Continued actions of this nature may result in:Formal referral to state bar disciplinary authorities for violations of the Rules of Professional Conduct concerning bias, harassment, and discrimination; andReferral to appropriate civil rights enforcement agencies for investigation under state and federal hate crime and civil rights statutes.Please provide written confirmation within ten (10) business days that you have received this notice and that you will comply fully with its terms.Warmest Regards,
Herriot chides on Instapundit, “I THINK YOU MISUNDERSTAND THE LAW.” Ya think? The letter could be an exam question for an ethics class at a very non-competitive law school.
Related comments:
- The writer doesn’t seem to comprehend that “freedom of speech” thingy.
- Under what theory is criticizing one discriminatory program illegal if you don’t criticize all discriminatory programs, even if that’s what Herriot does, and she doesn’t?
- Reparations are almost certainly unconstitutional, at least until a mad scientist clones Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
- I view threatening letters from lawyers based on phony offenses as sanctionable, and would advise Herriot to report this moron to whatever bar he belongs to.
- I also see no reason why she shouldn’t reveal the name of the lawyer. The public has a right to know when a lawyer is completely incompetent and abuses his position.
- This passage is particularly unethical, as it is both ignorant and wrong: “Your selective and racially targeted opposition to Black equity initiatives, combined with your public standing as an attorney, member of a federal civil rights commission and educator, magnifies the discriminatory impact and constitutes a pattern of bias-based harassment under both state and federal law.”
- How does someone graduate from law school who is capable of sending such a letter?
Ethics Alarms 
I agree with every point you make, except the one about reparations being illegal. We’ve made smaller reparations in the past, to Native Americans and to interned Japanese. Reparations may be a bad idea, they would certainly be a huge administrative challenge–who qualifies? Only descendants of slaves? In what proportion? Some estimates say that up to 25% of the “white” population have some black heritage. So does 1/8th slave ancestry get you a 1/8th share? How do you make sure that someone of Caribbean or African descent doesn’t get it? Are we also compensating for the unimaginably vile Jim Crow years? What about Native Americans, many of whom also have African ancestry? They are certainly about as popular among most White voters as crabs at a whorehouse, to quote the late Senator Ev Dirksen on an unpopular piece of legislation, but in what sense are they illegal? They did a great thing in one county in VA that had shut its schools in response to desegregation, since the Constitution didn’t require schools, only that they be desegregated if they existed. The usual all white academies sprang up, with barely concealed government support, but a generation of black kids were left with substandard education. VA…compensated them for the grave wrong done to them. Granted, it was easier because it was a small scale, and the wronged folks were still alive. But reparations are not manifestly immoral, and I’m curious to know how you get to the conclusion that they are unlawful. The spending power of Congress is pretty broad….
“The spending power of Congress is pretty broad….”
However, their pecuniary wherewithal/visible means of support is Other People’s Money.
PWS
That’s true, and is inherent in the nature of government itself. But it does not affect the legality of reparations. The former slaves would have been receiving other people’s money if they had gotten 40 acres and a mule in 1865.
In both cases, specific people subject to a specific injustice were compensated.
Reparations were made to the actual Japanese citizens or residents who had been wrongly interred, or their immediate heirs. This is very different than indiscriminate reparation based solely on racial or ethnic identity.
Same with Native Americans, who had been compensated for specific wrongs, such as forcible attendance at abusive residential schools, or wrongful taking of specific lands.
There may be isolated instances of other general reparations based on race, but mere precedent untested in court does not mean such actions were lawful or constitutional.
So your argument would be that reparations would be racial, and therefore illegal? So then every reparative racial program the courts have upheld from Bakke to Croson to today were all illegal? They too sought to make up for a historic wrong. Again–any specific racial program might be bad policy–but illegal should be a high bar.
Another way to think about it is this–slavery and Jim Crow were de jure discrimination, in which the government violently took the side of the White race against justice for the Black race. We know from decades of social science research that de facto inequality has descended at least in part because of the legacy of that wrong. Just a personal example–my family still has a house from the 1820s that my cousin inherited. It’s not a particularly nice house, but the land is incredibly valuable. The opportunity to pass on generational wealth has only been available on an equal status basis to African Americans in my lifetime. If you look at the income gap between equally qualified Black men and White men, and the same with women, in the same employment sector, it is minuscule. 1-4%. Still there, but not a big deal. BUT–the WEALTH gap is HUGE. The average White family has 11 times the wealth of the average Black family. Why? Surely it has something to do with slavery and Jim Crow. Right?
Slavery ended in 1865. Jim Crow was killed in 1964. How many trillions of dollars have been given to black people under the War on Poverty and welfare programs since the ’60s? The problem is pathology in the black underclass. Reparations won’t fix that. No one knows what will fix that. Affirmative Action hasn’t. DEI hasn’t. Let’s run a demonstration trial of reparations and see where the money ends up. My bet, it will be gone in a New York minute. The recipients will be descended upon by every variety of low life known to man.
The source of the White Black wealth gap has been studied for decades by some of the best minds around. If only they had thought to ask you, who can resolve it by simple assertion!
Do you really think that the black-white wealth gap is entirely a product of black malfeasance? Why do you think that? Do you honestly think that the allocation of social safety net programs (which are color blind) is an adequate substitute for reparations? So the White people (who are the majority of recipients) are….getting reparations for what exactly?
And your faith that the reparations would be terribly spent has some support, and some results that challenge it. Large legal settlements or casino profits (individually and on reservations) have often been lost rapidly by poor people. But some more recent studies of direct payments in lieu of bureaucracy suggest that Milton Friedman has a point–direct payments may be better than targeted programs with many employees.
Another good example is German payments to Israel, which have now totaled in the tens of billions. They didn’t attempt to find out which Jews were descendants of which victims. They just gave money. Was that also racism?
But individual payments to specific Jews for their losses were severely restricted. Read “A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz” by Göran Rosenberg. The author recounts the efforts by his father, who had lost his health in the concentration camps, trying to get compensation from the German government and running into obstacles repeatedly. Forms had to be filled out in German, dates and locations had to be accurate. Any mistake or gap caused the claim to be denied.
Bulk payments to Israel for a crime that took place 80 years ago for which there are still living survivors is not the same as reparations for some black Americans who have never been slaves.
Also, while I agree that pathology in the underclass is an important topic (among folks of all races), let me point out again that the Black White wealth gap is present at all levels of income. High income Blacks have much less wealth than Whites making the same income. Middle income Blacks have much less wealth than Whites making the same income. Some studies suggest the gap is LARGER at higher incomes. So…only focusing on the poorest misses the point, I think. If you have a white family pulling in 60K, and a black family doing the same–the White family will have, on average, 11 times the wealth. That makes a huge difference in making life work at 60K a year. I had a conservative friend who pointed out, over and over, that a married black family that waited to have kids until marriage was equal in social outcomes with a white family that did the same. But, he noted, so few Black families meet that standard. What his story ignores is all the ways in which marriage and waiting for kids is in part a function of wealth. It’s hard for a man and woman with zero assets to get married (socially, intellectually, and economically). It’s hard for a man and woman with zero assets to decide to bring kids into the world. And it doesn’t get much easier with minimal assets.
Again–I’m not making an argument here FOR reparations–I’m just saying they wouldn’t be illegal. There’s historical precedents. There’s ample justification. And there’s a lot of malarkey in opposition.
Previous reparations were to sovereign tribes or identifiable groups of civilly injured persons. There is no way to identify an injured class since all the injured and liable are DEAD and their “descendants” are mixed rather thoroughly into the general population. You are beating a dead horse and the horrse is just bones at this point, move on…
CEES VAN BARNEVELDT made this claim.
https://ethicsalarms.com/2025/10/31/friday-open-forum-halloween-edition/comment-page-1/#comment-894367
We know from decades of social science research that de facto inequality has descended at least in part because of the legacy of that wrong. Just a personal example–my family still has a house from the 1820s that my cousin inherited. It’s not a particularly nice house, but the land is incredibly valuable. The opportunity to pass on generational wealth has only been available on an equal status basis to African Americans in my lifetime. If you look at the income gap between equally qualified Black men and White men, and the same with women, in the same employment sector, it is minuscule. 1-4%. Still there, but not a big deal. BUT–the WEALTH gap is HUGE. The average White family has 11 times the wealth of the average Black family. Why? Surely it has something to do with slavery and Jim Crow. Right?
I want to point out that social scientists evaluate outcomes and look to external factors that cause them. Social scientists rarely look at behavioral and cultural aspects of group behavior to postulate expected outcomes. If de facto inequality stems from at least some part of Jim Crow laws we better be able to identify those specific people and by how much. The argument that in some small part means that restitution by an uninvolved third party is required to compensate some affected by Jim Crow is no different than blaming a person run over by a drunk driver because they did not get out of the driver’s way.
Behaviors are often learned due to systemic failures that perpetuate if not exacerbate apparent inequities in the Lorenz curve. Poor families of all stripes today are hindered in wealth creation because the government places an asset cap on individuals seeking government subsidies for what I will call daily living activities. Once that cap is met benefits start decreasing so the individual learns that saving and investing is counter-productive. Income also plays a role so getting a job that pays a bit more now but will cause you your health care subsidy to be reduced by more than your higher income teaches the same thing.
Jim Crow laws do not explain why there are so many more single mothers today when during Jim Crow 2 parent black families were the norm but social service policies do. Existing Jim Crow laws do not explain the rapid decline in Black graduation rates at every level after the advent of the Great Society programs of the mid 60’s, but activists who shape black opinion on what it means to be educated do.
Wealth is determined not by what you inherit but by what you DO NOT spend. Most of our billionaire class did not come from the “landed gentry” of old money. Some of course did but the vast majority of those 18th, 19th and 20th century Americans were tenants of others. How did they achieve a level of success when the Irish or Italians were discriminated against as much as Blacks. The lynching of Italians is what caused the nation to celebrate Columbus day but we rarely mention that Italians, Slavic peoples and the Irish were seen as vermin in the 19th and early 20th century.
Because homeownership reflects the majority of an average family’s wealth it should be examined as to why the wealth gap exists despite increases in black ownership. The concept of home ownership as the American dream becoming a reality started after WW2. Home ownership of Blacks in the mid 20th century was only slightly less then than today and occurred without Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or other government guarantees. Ironically, home ownership as a percent of a state’s total is lowest in the three of the most progressive states; New York, Massachusetts, and California. Home ownership as a percent of the total is highest in West Virginia 72.6%. Obviously, states with higher populations will be subject to greater demand for existing stocks of housing which will price many out of the market. But, that is a function of policies or economies that attract migrants from other states or nations. The point is that the demand for housing stocks can drive up housing prices and rents. This drives down owner occupied home ownership which is the major source of net worth. This affects the ability of others not receiving governmental subsidies to have to delay buying until they can amass sufficient down payments. This delays the compounding effects of price escalation and equity building. Importing millions of foreigners into the US did not help alleviate escalating housing costs.
Bottom line. I can take two people of the same race and class, give them the same earnings but teach one to save 10 cents out of every dollar earned and allow the other to spend ever dime received and at the end of some period of time the saver will have at a minimum 10 times the wealth of the other. And, that wealth will grow at a compounded rate so long as it remains invested and not spent on ego satisfying desires.
Such persons (spendthrifts) of of every race and gender exist in our society and their collective behaviors within each group determine the level of wealth accumulated. Maybe instead of blaming some archaic laws from 100 years ago and begin to examine why people behave as they do and try to teach alternative strategies to help them acquire assets to generate wealth through their own behavioral changes you might start seeing the desired improvements.
Was hoping, and hopeful, you’d offer your learned take on this, CM; you didn’t disappoint!
It’ll going into my BURSTING_AT_THE_SEAMS EA file.
PWS
Agreed. Chris, a fantastic response!!
Addendum
In Maryland households headed by single women about one third 32-33% deceive SNAP benefits compared to 2.8 % of two parent households. This data does not reflect racial makeup but the ratio of married couples to single female headed households is substantially weighted toward whites being married or two earner households.
It’s an erudite response, but there are two important errors in it.
First, this statement is not close to being true “How did they achieve a level of success when the Irish or Italians were discriminated against as much as Blacks. “
There was discrimination against BOTH groups, but it was never as essentialist, never as nearly universal, as it was against Blacks. There was no similar legal code as with Jim Crow, specifying separate schools for Irish and Italians. They were given the right to vote in almost all localities without exception. There was no nearly universal social rejection of intermarriage. There’s a great book How the Irish Became White that covers the journey of that people, and similar works by historians and sociologists about Italians. Suffice to say, no serious scholar would make the claim you did about the equality of barriers facing ethnic whites and blacks. From the aftermath of Bacon’s rebellion in the colony period, one of the big pushes was to destroy the brief period of Irish-Black unity. It was largely successful, and one of the ways it manifested, with the Irish and with other newcomers, was the sense that, while they faced social exclusion and some discrimination, it was always less than that faced by the Blacks, and usually much better than back home, overall.
There’s no denying that blacks in the US experienced a unique degree of discrimination and cultural denigration unmatched by any other ethnic group in cruelty, harm, intensity and duration. And there’s no denying that centuries of abuse and deprivation, plus the shattering of family and culture created persistent, often crippling toxic habits, life-styles and behavior patterns that nobody has figured out how to ameliorate. It may even be hopeless: the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow may be a permanent handicap.
All true, but still not a justification for reparations.
What are these toxic behavior patterns and how were they caused by Jim Crow laws?
Lots of books and treatises on THAT topic. The culture of stable families and parental responsibility was knee-capped in the practices of slavery. Jim Crow reinforced low self esteem and feelings of inferiority among blacks.Enforced second-class citizenship and deprivation of basic human rights created a culture of poverty, resulting in crime, unethical conduct as the norm, substance-abuse (self-medication and escapism, and a lack of long-term time perspective, where individuals are conditioned to spend money rather than save it for themselves or their families. Thus we saw the “numbers” racket, which was overwhelmingly a black community phenomenon, and now the lotteries.
I’ll never forget a conversation I had with a black cab driver bemoaning the state of the Capital. “The real problem,” he said, “is that there aren’t enough white people in the government. Black people just don’t know how to run stuff.”
Here was something I first read from a tweet by Larry Elder.
https://www.standard.net/opinion/national-commentary/2018/aug/03/larry-elder-anne-hathaway-is-making-race-relations-worse/
Of course, tone should factor that hose teens are likely biased by hearing stories of Jim Crow from their parents, and contrasting that with their own personal experiences.
There was discrimination against BOTH groups, but it was never as essentialist, never as nearly universal, as it was against Blacks.
The same laws that affected Blacks also affected Asians and others during that time frame. A count of the entries in Wikipedia outlining the states with what are called Jim Crow laws amount to only 28 states and most of those laws deal with interracial marriage that you would think adversely affects whites as much as any other race. The other Jim Crow laws are those that affect public accommodations. If you want to argue that schools for Blacks and other nonwhites were inferior to white schools you need to make that case but mere separation does not mean inferiority especially when graduation rates among Black youth were higher before 1964 and Black achievement in math and reading has been dropping for many years despite fully integrated schools with faculty who look like them and a laundry list of special services for children.
I want to point out that this post was about wealth accumulation. There were no “Jim Crow laws” that bar savings and investment by Blacks or any other non-white group. Free Blacks in Maryland were quite affluent by standards of the day in the mid 1800’s many were merchants and traders or were skilled trades people. The History of Baltimore by Randall Byrne is a good source of information about social structures in that period.
I will not argue that some Blacks by virtue of past practices did not have their ability to move up the economic ladder stymied by federal housing laws but to say that these laws had broad impact on the entire Black community is unreasonable. Specifically, I am referencing the exclusion of Black WW2 vets from VA mortgage benefits or federal mortgage insurance programs being created that objectively separated Black areas from white areas. However, just as today, not everyone was seeking or able to buy a home. Thus, one’s personal choices play a role in the economic outcome.
Redlining did impact some who might otherwise qualify for a loan. The question arises is why was it necessary to identify insurable areas and uninsurable areas? Was it racially motivated or was it predicated on some type of history of default rates? It is hard to tell when mortgage default rates in the late 30’s were running upwards of 50% which led to even more federal intervention to protect borrowers from foreclosure.
You mentioned voting rights. Voting rights for Blacks preceded those of women who were economically discriminated against as late as 1970’s yet women have prospered and now obtain more college degrees than their male counterparts. They are also outpacing their contemporaries in wage growth. The laws that worked to prevent Blacks from voting such as poll taxes and literacy tests, not to mention the time when one must own land to get to vote affected poor illiterate white sharecroppers as it did Blacks.
Keeping people from integrating adversely affects all participants but what keeps some down is the belief that that was the reason for a personal lack of achievement. You cannot argue that white society gained an unfair advantage by the lack of integration while simultaneously arguing that Blacks could not achieve success without integration into white society. What is good for one must also be good for the other and vice versa. Other than white society being a larger economic market what stymied black wealth accumulation when their were no laws preventing trade between the races? Moreover, the very laws that affected Blacks affected the Chinese and they outperform white males and white females.
You could argue just as effectively that whites were barred from the same integration that Blacks and other races were barred. To assume that Blacks when being prevented from integrating with whites held them back assumes that there was an imbalance of talent between the races in favor of whites. That is a dangerous slope upon which to tread.
The belief that discrimination was the essential element in retarding Black economic progress can only be asserted in areas where Jim Crow laws were enacted AND racial prejudices as a holdover from the antebellum southern society made life there less desirable for Blacks. These laws and the growth of industrial production in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and other northern states and were the principle reason for a mass migration of southern Blacks to those areas. Therefore, blacks were not as universally discriminated against as many would like us to believe.
The social rejection of interracial marriage was held in both the Black and non-Black communities as were the rejection of marriages between Christian and Jew or Catholic and non-Catholic. Social stratification more often than not occurs because people tend to bond with others who hold similar cultures and beliefs. To suggest that because whites in power codified in law social rules regarding behaviors and acts that were rejected by a variety of different groups to maintain an sense of self as racist fails to acknowledge that if others were in power they might have made the same laws.
The Black community did not emerge because they were relegated to certain parts of town because of race by law. The black community engaged in self-segregation. Any lines that were drawn occurred after members of those communities settled in. There is sense of safety and a degree of comfort one gains from living amongst people that look and think as you do. That is normal and not racist. I went to Baltimore City schools before 1964 and never saw signs of segregation. Many cities have ethnic neighborhoods. I lived in a mixed neighborhood of black and white. There is no doubt when a group of like people felt its culture was in danger of being displaced that the group did actively work to discourage others from entering their social circles. But culture is not determined by race it is determined by values and attitudes. People do fear cultures they believe would endanger the maintenance of common shared values if the begin to enter their communities. They see it as a threat to the cohesiveness of the social order and its ability to withstand negative influences.
I do find it amusing when activists complain about the practice of redlining but if neighborhood redevelopment and revitalization occurs which integrates their neighborhoods which brings new money to an area it is seen negatively as gentrification. Activists work hard to get the redevelopment dollars from government but work to prevent the attraction of buyers from “other” demographic groups.
I spent five years listening to and counseling Black and white offenders in our state prison system as the liaison between the prison system and the community college where I worked in both an administrative and faculty capacity. I learned a great deal about how the poor think and what it takes to get them believe in themselves to become productive. I preceded that experience working in West Baltimore in community development in a predominately Black and economically distressed area. Culture, not race plays a much larger role in economic achievement and social development. You need to change from a culture of dependency and learn to defer consumption before you can earn a good living and amass real wealth.
As for the push to end the Black-Irish unity. The claim that their exclusion and discrimination it could be worse could be worse carried a far different connotation in Boston and New York where submission meant staying alive. The Irish nonetheless were not accepted and skin color was their camouflage. Change your name from O’Malley to Wilson and no one knows you don’t belong. Displaying your Irish heritage would cause you grief.
Consequently, I don’t think I made any errors in my analysis.
Social scientists rarely look at behavioral and cultural aspects of group behavior to postulate expected outcomes.–this is not a key error, but it is very much an error. Social scientists look at this ALL the time. The cultural explanation for the wealth gap is examined. It has some truth to it, but–what explains culture? Do people get to choose their culture? Why have Black rates of illegitimacy been higher than that of whites from the first measurement? The Black family was under constant assault during the era of slavery. Jim Crow was only a little better. I’m sympathetic to the Charles Murray argument that some of the policies of welfare in the 60s and 70s exacerbated the problem, in a way similar to what you describe. BUT–when you turn to housing, you are missing a massive part of the story. Redlining. When my ancestors were amassing real estate, they could buy it almost anywhere in America. In every place where Blacks were present, from 1865 (or earlier in the North and West) their ability to purchase real estate was greatly constricted by law and by corporate and by community behavior. A Black family that bought a house in South Chicago was almost killed in the 1960s. Similar stories dot the landscape throughout the 20th century. Then–government did not offer home loans in many of the ghetto communities. The result was–a direct targeted assault on the ability of Black families to gain wealth. The housing discrimination is one of the BEST arguments for reparations, because home value is so central to middle class stability. Also–unlike some of the other aspects, housing discrimination didn’t end in 1957, or 1964, or even 1968. Much of it persisted well into the 1980s, and some of it goes on today. Tidbit–the first time Donald Trump’s name got in the NYTs was because he and his dad got caught by the Feds blatantly discriminating in their housing sales.
Some have pointed out the success of Vietnamese refugees who arrived in the mid-1970’s, and who would largely been less able than Black people to buy homes, even as late as 1995.
The Black family was under constant assault during the era of slavery.
Only insofar as the fact that family members were sold off but that has little to no relevance today. That argument is like saying because the Pharaohs enslaved the Jews and did the same thing we should expect Jewish illegitimacy.
Any assault on the Black family today is a direct result of social service policies that promote single female headed households. The Black man has been driven from the home by these social scientists that recommend policies to government. He has been relegated to the role of sperm donor to women who wish to obtain more subsidies. Asset caps and other wealth limiting policies that dissuade some from committing to relationships that yield two earner family structures are coming directly from social services and politicians who benefit from a permanent underclass. When a Democrat Congresswoman says it is inhumane to ask able bodied people to work 20 hours a week to be continue getting SNAP or Medicaid subsidies the evidence is right in front of you.
The argument that intergenerational wealth from homeownership fails to consider that much of that wealth today winds up being consumed by long term care costs. The rise and prevalence of reverse mortgages is evidence that a substantial part of any earned equity will be consumed long before any transfer of wealth can take place.
When my ancestors were amassing real estate, they could buy it almost anywhere in America.
I don’t know what data supports your argument that Blacks were legally restricted from buying homes anywhere. Such laws would have been totally unconstitutional. I don’t doubt that some Blacks experienced push back from non blacks when they entered some communities that were not predominantly Black to begin with and I have acknowledged Red Lining. But there was another practice going on at the same time and it was called Block Busting. This is when realtors would tell neighbors that Blacks were moving in and they ought to sell before the the Blacks bring down property values. Realtors get paid to list the house and or sell the house so they have an incentive to get owners to trade up. Well guess what happens when realtors create fear. The supply of homes on the market increase driving down property values and Blacks got a better price. At which point residents of predominantly white communities fled to suburbia and the Black diaspora colonized those neighborhoods. It got so bad that Baltimore in the 70’s had to ban for-sale signs in certain neighborhoods to prevent housing prices from collapsing further.
When your ancestors were amassing real estate they made a conscious decision to buy real estate with what they had saved. That means they chose not to consume every bit of income they had. I have to assume because you used the word “amass” I concluded that your ancestors were buying land and not necessarily houses and were wealthy enough to begin with to pay cash or had the where with all to make large balloon payments in 5 -6 years after settling the purchase. Buying real estate was the exception not the rule in the 19th century. And most everyone in an urban area was a tenant until after WW2. Even then it was not until the 1950’s before we saw much longer term mortgages. The GI bill facilitated the growth in home ownership and I have acknowledged the Black GIs’ were excluded from that benefit during the Roosevelt and later Truman administrations. Descendants and surviving spouses of those veterans are now eligible to get those benefits.
If we are going to go with trivia the it was FDR who signed into law the acts that created redlining.
Since you brought up Trump as a discriminator we should at least examine the cultural and economic scene in that time frame
“In the 1970s, New York City was a broken, ungovernable metropolis barreling into anarchy. New Yorkers remember this decade as the bleakest, most crime-ridden, and most uncertain time the city has ever faced. It was a time of economic, criminal, and cultural shifts occurring at once that changed the city’s prospects.”
Gritty Photos Capture the Urban Decay and the Street Life of New York City in the 1970s
Is it possible that the culture degradation witnessed by Trump and his father might have given them pause with respect to renting to some people. Not a justification but such associations cannot be dismissed as racism when the entire city was falling apart.
“Then–government did not offer home loans in many of the ghetto communities.“
Could there be a reason other than race? The ability to repay is essential to getting a loan. This is not a targeted assault on Black families. To make this a valid comparison you have to compare people of different races with relatively equal incomes. Credit histories are a relatively new phenomenon because revolving credit really did not exist until the 1960’s. Individual store credit was the norm and there were no credit reporting bureaus then.
Is it race that prevents Kroger from opening stores in low income communities? Is it race that forces the neighborhood drug store to move after being burglarized or looted numerous times? In 1987, Safeway announced it was going to build a large grocery store in West Baltimore to eliminate the “food desert” in Baltimore’s poorest communities. Safeway got great press along with some substantial assistance from the city’s economic development group. It operated for less than ten years before shuttering its doors because of mounting losses. This had nothing to do with race.
Choosing to find external factors for reasons for some lack of achievement is the easy sell. Even I don’t like to examine my own behaviors for not achieving a goal but unless I do the odds on me getting over the hump and moving forward are slim to none.
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https://www.harvardmagazine.com/university-news/harvard-two-parent-black-family-america
I appreciate the linked article but without an understanding of the study’s methodology and a complete lack of data other than the comparison between 2 adult black households with children and those headed by white females being about the same in terms of achievement.
The article is somewhat vague on definitions as well. When they referenced 2 adult black families the author speaks of co-habitation rather than parentage and for white households the author uses parents as the term of reference. I found that odd if not a disqualifier of the analysis because co-habitants do not necessarily have similar commitments to family as do married couples. The article does not indicate whether or not the male member is a economic contributor in a traditional sense. In some cases, unemployable co-habitating males have significant deleterious effects on the children raised by single mothers because they earn income in a less desirable manner. This affects both races.
IThe article goes on to draw conclusions that systemic racism is to blame and that cuts to federal support programs such as SNAP and other subsidies will exacerbate the problems in the urban Black community by putting pressures on Blacks that cause them to be unable to achieve success. Nowhere does it discuss what lessons are taught within the household.
Given the fact that more single white female households are on SNAP than Black female headed households with children why is it that the single white female households are performing at roughly the same rate as two adult Black households. Would not the same stresses be just as detrimental?
From 2020 census for Maryland. 33% of unmarried female headed households are on SNAP benefits compared to 2.8% of married couples.
Oh, I agree completely. Remember, this is being pimped at Harvard. The study makes no sense in common sense terms and the methodology is suspect: it reeks of agenda-driven science.
Wait–are you seriously arguing that redlining was not racial? How do you know that? There are careful rigorous studies going back decades that find dramatic evidence of racial motives. Do not sell covenants. Direct plans by real estate agents and companies. Builders. Banks. It wasn’t nationally coordinated. It was mostly local elites, who profited both from the high price of shitty real estate in the ghetto and from targeted expansions that led to whites selling at a massive discount unexpectedly. I’m sure also the considerations you raise played a role–and with increasing force as time went on, and redlining became dangerous as the government sometimes held people accountable after the passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act….but it was racial at its genesis and for decades after.
Let me first say that anyone who says there is one reason alone for why Blacks in general accumulate wealth slower than other racial groups is lying. My entire thrust of my arguments to JDK is that we must evaluate the many variable that impact people’s lives and the resulting choices they make.
Reading JDK’s rebuttal I found that in each case he argues the Black man or woman lacks agency over their own decision making. This is probably the only area in which we disagree. We can argue ad nauseum about what negative events led to the ongoing destruction of the Black family and we will neve come to a definitive singular answer. Many factors play a role in human development. Some like Dr. Ben Carson or General Lloyd Austin or Cicely Tyson are able to overcome that which some claim holds back Blacks but to find solutions we should be examining what those who are successful did for themselves instead of examining what others are perceived to have done to them.
The eugenics of the Antebellum south may be true before 1865 but we are 7 generations removed from a time of buying and selling people. We are also more than 3 generations removed from the Civil Rights act of 1964. More than 60 years have passed and Black children are less able to read and write than their grandparents. This is not a function of racism or mass incarceration it is a function of familial priorities. At this time, the truancy rate in Montgomery county MD is 6.9% while the neighboring Prince Georges County stands at 29% and this is an improvement from prior periods of over 34%.
Prince Georges County MD racial makeup: Approximately 11.3% White, 59.1% Black or African American, 4.3% Asian, and 21.2% Hispanic or Latino residents.
Montgomery County, MD racial makeup: Approximately 44.38% White, 18.61% Black or African American, 15.19% Asian, and 20.63% Hispanic or Latino residents.
The point of all that is that when people shun education and become less able to create value they earn less and when they earn less the ability to amass wealth falls precipitously.
Perhaps I am somewhat biased because I only know of one relative that ever acquired a familial home. Neither I nor any of my brothers got financial help from family to buy our first homes. So I am willing to concede that my perception of what is possible is based on my personal experience. Can I say my reality?
As for Redlining, it no doubt was more often than not based on racial boundaries but the question as to whether it was to prevent black ownership and equity building because of racial animus is questionable. The original intent was to ensure that economically sound mortgage practices would be the norm. You can disagree that the thinking was flawed and I think it was but they had a better handle on buyer behavior than we do looking back. The link to the Federal Reserve sheds light on why the practice was adopted. It is true that Black areas were considered questionable in terms of economic viability and codicils were written into contracts to exclude Black purchases of property in what were deemed sound areas.
Redlining | Federal Reserve History
The problem with associating redlining with the inability by Blacks to become homeowners fails to recognize that Black ownership did rise from 1934 to the mid sixties but not as fast as white ownership. Some of this can be attributed to locational choices, fewer Black buyers which dampened demand for properties in predominantly minority communities caused slower appreciation rates in those communities and subsequently slower wealth building, and to some degree, racism but we cannot argue that racism prevents Blacks from learning and achieving today.
Another tid bit from history: In 1995, Joe Biden was the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Clinton administration. At that time they were deciding to eliminate post secondary educational opportunities for inmates in state prisons. I received correspondence from his office telling me he had no intention of allowing prisoners to get Pell grants when others were denied. He must of thought I was an idiot because Pell grants were income based entitlements just like SNAP or WIC. No one lost an opportunity to go to college except those trying to make better choices while in prison. BTW my program’s 20 year recidivism rate was under 20% according to data from the Maryland Department of Corrections because we instilled within the men a sense of real value and accomplishment which they carried into the free world. That program had its final graduation in May 1995 after 25 years. The actor Charles Dutton, and early student of ours who had been convicted of murder spoke at that graduation.
If the goal is to promote Black homeownership as a means to help them build equity then long term housing subsidies should be replaced with a one time cash grant to qualified and employed borrowers to meet the basic closing costs and a down payment commensurate with the prevailing requirements for VA or FHA loans. Lower income borrowers might be given an opportunity to use their Section 8 vouchers for a period of time while they build sufficient equity through appreciation to qualify for conforming loan requirements. Every process or strategy that we develop to achieve a particular social goal must have some type of finite time limit and reinforce behaviors known to lead to increased wealth creation. Of course what I just outlined as potential strategy would need guardrails and a lot of hand holding as we move people off government subsidies and into the mainstream. We cannot continue to feed and house growing numbers of persons for generations.
You make some good contextual arguments, so the fact that I am picking at some of them doesn’t indicate they are all weak or problematic. I think we probably have a great deal of agreement. That said, this is a very weak argument that you make about TV ads on end stage health care costs. Yes–that can reduce inheritances, sometimes to zero. BUT–think more deeply about that argument. Black people die, too. When their parents are writhing in agony, living alone in danger, unable to care for themselves, sometimes lacking funds…what happens? Having 1/11th the family wealth of the average White family means…that one reason the younger generation of Blacks remains mired in poverty compared to the wealth of Whites is the sandwich generation often ends up paying for the health care of their parents. The end stage costs revert to the children, creating one more racialized barrier to middle class status. So I don’t think that is any kind of argument that minimizes the impact of the wealth gap. It is a manifestation of history’s ongoing role in the lives of Black Americans. I don’t think it can all be blamed on Black malfeasance–I wouldn’t even blame MUCH of it on that.
I don’t think I’ve seen an answer to the original post–how are reparations ILLEGAL or UNCONSTITUTIONAL?
Also, I do think good points have been made about the effect of cut points on income on the poor. If you make this much–your home heating assistance gets reduced. This much, SNAP gets cut. This much, you don’t qualify for Medicaid, on and on. I had a conservative PhD student who did a marvelous study of this very question–do cut points affect the economic lives of the poor? He found (it was 2008, so my memory isn’t great) that it did, but not as much as you might think, in part because each program was a separate fiefdom, run by its own rules, enforced in different ways. We bury the poor in paperwork, much of it now online. We spend billions to make sure that there isn’t fraud or abuse, in each program, adding the administrative cost and administrative burden. But if you are right, and I think you are, that the cut points teach some recipients that striving is pointless–what is to be done about poverty in America? My own amateur (this is not my area of expertise) temporary solution would be to have greater unity in the programs, and instead of cut points, time limits to each of them along with greater administrative ease of return. But I’d also like to see some experiments along the lines of the Milton Friedman argument–just cut out all the bureaucrats, and give the poor half of the entire cost of the program in a direct payment. It’s a little like the Yang idea. But also–on housing and infrastructure–radical endorsement of the Build, Baby, Build agenda in Ezra Klein’s new book.
How do you account for Vietnamese refugees?
It’s easy–I take their revenue, subtract their expenses, and…
🙂
No, I went to a high school where the valedictorian was a Vietnamese immigrant who worked 3 hours a night in her family’s restaurant, hadn’t spoken English until 7th grade…so I’m very familiar with the arguments that Asian immigrants PROVE that there’s no systemic racism. Similar points were made about the mad success of impoverished Jews like my ancestors in the lower east side, who in one generation got richer than my WASPy New England ancestors ever did in three centuries of striving. How I account for them is that OF COURSE culture matters. Values like delayed gratification, reverence for education and hard work, strong families…these matter. A long cultural affinity for capitalism doesn’t hurt, either, particularly of the petit bourgeois variety. The business district of my hometown by 1983 was called the Ho Chi Minh Trail by some because so many low end small businesses were Vietnamese owned, just a few years after they were penniless refugees. (there was also a Vietnamese stripper duo a few years later that went by the name the Tet Offensive, but I digress). A couple points–refugees WERE given assistance in landing in America. Language training. Housing assistance. And, importantly, much like many successful immigrant communities throughout US history, they had mentors, helpers, informal loan networks, as they launched their businesses. The clumping of immigrants from various regions of the home country ensures more tightly knit trust networks. This is something again that former slaves were systematically denied. Finally–the stereotype of Asians as hard working, intelligent, law-abiding (with its UNAMERICAN, non-White, non-Christian downside of alienness) created a different environment for Asian achievement. So–history matters. culture matters. Policy matters. That’s how I account for the Vietnamese.
How were former slaves denied trust networks?
Great question. There wasn’t a law against it. But think of the difference in arrival. Blacks almost 100% came to this shore in chains. The middle passage killed around 20-40% of passengers. They were stripped of their language, their religion, their heritage, their names, their COMMUNITY. Then…decades of slavery. Slavery truncated community. How many deep friendships? How many loan arrangements? The myth of the immigrant is that they arrived alone, or in a tight nuclear family. That wasn’t the case most of the time. They came, as my Jewish ancestors did, as part of a family wave. A cousin, and his family, and all of their friendships and marriage relationships, all their village. So when a cousin brings over an uncle…there’s a network. Many villages moved to specific cities, recreating the networks of Sicily, of Hvar, of Lvov in the Italian, Croatian, or Ukrainian neighborhoods in St. Louis, Cleveland, New York etc. It’s a bit like the old kid’s story, Stone Soup. You think you have nothing…but if you are part of a community…you can make it work. It wasn’t all kumbaya and success. There were grifters, and liars, and cheats, and thieves. There were lazy people who borrowed and meant well but never succeeded. But the immigrant experience, then and now, is radically different from the experience of the former slaves. You see it now with Caribbean and African immigrants. It doesn’t mean that former slaves had no work ethic or lacked values. They simply lacked the networks and community. It was sometimes recreated, of course. Tulsa is a marvelous example, the Black Wall Street of its day in Oklahoma. It was destroyed in one of the worst race riots in our history, a little genocide and ethnic cleansing in the heartland. Black success was met with violence, over and over, on smaller scales. This also destroyed community, sometimes quite literally. Were Italians sometimes targeted? Were Jews? Were Irish? Sure. But no serious person can look at the historical record and find equivalence. The only comparison possible is the treatment of Native Americans. They could have a good claim to be treated worse than Blacks, but it’s an argument no one should want to win.
That happened so long ago, and trust networks were not re-established.
Jews have managed to reforge trust networks less than twenty years after the Holocaust.
Have they? In Israel, or here, or where? If you mean here and Israel, I think we can all agree that the reception in both places for Holocaust survivors was a lot different than the brief imperfect reconstruction and then the dark night of decades of Jim Crow. I know there were very strong networks of Jews in America that welcomed survivors. I think there were similar things in Israel. there’s a HUGE difference between going through a trauma like the Holocaust and then finding a refuge far away with existing networks of conationalists or coreligionists and going through slavery and being very much victimized in short order.
I did say that reparations could be considered unconstitutional based on equal protection. Not all Blacks were slaves. My original statement took issue with your use of the word illegal when Jack claimed Constitutional issues. All things are legal until legislation prohibits them but some things while legal may be unconstitutional was my point.
You said Having 1/11th the family wealth of the average White family means…that one reason the younger generation of Blacks remains mired in poverty compared to the wealth of Whites is the sandwich generation often ends up paying for the health care of their parents. The end stage costs revert to the children, creating one more racialized barrier to middle class status.
This statement is factually false. Adult children are not legally required to pay the long term care cost for aging parents so that cannot mire them in poverty.
What happens is the elderly with few resources wind up being cared for through Medicaid. Medicaid pays the entire cost of long term care costs after all resources have been depleted. At a minimum of 6000/month in a skilled facility would bleed the middle income family dry in less than five years. Many wealthier persons buy life estates costing over 300K just to ensure they have a spot in a chosen skilled care facility when they need it. The value received by those people is indeterminant because if they die the day after signing the contract the facility has earned its compensation in full just as it would if the client lives thirty more years.
Another factor to consider is that while you have made the claim that differential home ownership rates represent the reason for wealth disparity you cannot simple assume that all that equity can be immediately converted to cash without incurring substantial transaction costs. The poor having few assets to convert immediately acquire public resources for long term care.
I did not say home ownership was THE reason, just one of many. One thing we agree on is that the gap in wealth between White and Black is multi causal. No one factor explains it. Perhaps not even half of it.
“This statement is factually false. Adult children are not legally required to pay the long term care cost for aging parents so that cannot mire them in poverty.” Who said ANYTHING about legally required? If your parents are getting older, and have no savings, and you have a little bit, you don’t legally have to do anything. But so many people, of all races…do. And this is why the 11-1 ratio in wealth is not ameliorated by late stage health care costs, but if anything, made much much much worse. My mother was diagnosed with dementia in 2018, and died in 2023. She had excellent long term insurance, so we got her great care. My dad took 9 months to die from cancer in 2009. He had tricare, medicare, and a supplemental. So it never cost us kids anything except pain. But in both cases, had my parents not saved (and inherited from their parents), we kids would have ponied up. I think a lot of Black families end up poorer than ever, without inheritances at all. I know of one poor family directly that was impoverished by burial costs. The wealth gap…MATTERS. What we do about it is a difficult question, but what is easy is to see that some (a lot in my opinion) is directly a result of history.
“I don’t know what data supports your argument that Blacks were legally restricted from buying homes anywhere. “
There were vast restrictions in the South and the rest of the country. There were “sundown” counties in a lot of border states. In those towns and counties, Blacks were somewhat welcome as necessary during the day–but not allowed to live or stay overnight. There were neighborhoods with covenants that said “this domicile may not be sold to someone of the African, Asiatic, or Jewish race”–you say they would be unconstitutional, but under Plessy v. Ferguson and the cases known as the Civil Rights cases in the post civil war era, they were upheld, under the logic that Blacks were free to set up their own covenants, private parties had the right to racially discriminate until the 1964 CRA. And in your own answer–the BlockBusting was a result of the prior exclusion of Blacks from neighborhood after neighborhood by legal and social means.
That was sixty years ago.
“Only insofar as the fact that family members were sold off but that has little to no relevance today. “
Two points on this–first, it was more than families being split. Many plantations, particularly in Virginia which was a “slave seller” state, practiced primitive eugenics–breeding the largest women and men together, to have the best offspring for sale. you also had well documented cases of rape and coercion of women, then the birth of half-white children to a married black couple. That tended to erode the family, to say the least. My understanding of Jewish slavery under Pharaonic Egypt is remarkably tiny, but I’ve never heard of offspring being sold or breeding or systematic rape, or a couple being split. Maybe it was a regular practice.
Second point–this debate goes back quite a while. Are you familiar with the Moynihan Report? Working for Nixon, a young Pat Moynihan (academic before politician) studied why black illegitimacy was so high. He basically said the cause of poverty in the black community was weak families, and got HUGE blowback from liberals for not noting how much of the weakness was caused by racism and slavery. At the time, 30% was the scandalously high rate. Now, it’s above 70% last time I looked. It would be hard to argue that racism has gotten worse since 1970, so what is causing that? There’s a great book from a decade ago called The New Jim Crow that offers a partial answer–mass incarceration. But I’m sure cultural influences play a role as well.
And they were incarcerated randomly?
Of course not? But she notes that there was a radical increase in incarceration, and it had a disproportionate racial impact. The well known difference in crack vs. powder cocaine penalties. The fact that white and black teens use marijuana at about the same rates, but black kids are much more likely to have criminal records from simple possession…and this can lead to a lifetime of truncated chances. One kid, say George W. Bush, gets to experiment with dope relatively risk free. Kid in the ghetto, not so much. It’s a powerful book. You start out thinking–no way can this be the “new Jim Crow” By the end, she’s made quite an argument.
Now check comparative criminal homicide rates.
As an immigrant I am a bit bewildered about why in 2025 we still have a discussion about reparations for slavery.
Here are a number of my random thoughts:
Jim Crow did not end in 1964. Remember massive resistance? It took more than a decade of rigorous enforcement by judges, prosecutors and actions by brave local politicians just to integrate the schools. Some other aspects were even more resilient. The long slow death of Jim Crow could best be described as ending around 1975-1980? As for reparations being charged against those who were not responsible for slavery–we have inadequately and episodically sought to pay back Native Americans for the wrongs done to them, some as old as slavery. Immigrants pay taxes that support the bureaucracies on reservations. Immigrants to Germany, those born after 1945, opponents of Hitlerism–all paid for reparations to Israel equally, in the form of taxes. A similar logic would work here. My question is not “are reparations just”? They clearly are morally justified by the gravity of slavery and Jim Crow’s vast evil, just as the Holocaust justified Germany’s response. My question would be–what form could they take that would begin to be helpful? Is there one? And the administrative difficulties earlier mentioned.
A person doesn’t have to be a social scientist or have a Ph.D. to watch episodes of “The First Forty-Eight” and see pathology in all its glory flourishing among the black underclass.
Watching TV shows is more fun than reading scholarship, I’ll give you that. And I’m a big fan of the idea that sometimes, the artists know more than the eggheads. But in order to know if that is the case, I think you need to engage with both?
Saying something is almost certainly unconstitutional does not mean illegal. The legislature passes laws which can make something legal or illegal that is later determined to be unconstitutional or an executive can issue an order that can be determined either way as well.
one could argue that reparations would violate the 14th amendment by not compensating the southerners for the economic losses when property was taken from them by Union forces without compensation as required by the 5th amendment.
Because someone believes something is unconstitutional does not make an act legal or illegal without specific legislation that impose sanctions for such conduct.
This is explicitly listed in CRCP 3.10. it seems some other states have dropped similar rules, believing them redundant.
Personal experience is the California bar is not exactly eager to enforce this rule though.
None of the bars are. It’s a big issue with me.
“Warmest regards” was the best part of that little missive. the author accused Prof. Heriot of being a racist but concludes the letter with that? What a jerk.
jvb
Right there with you, John. Unbelievable. What an asshole.
“…hearby ordered…” – By what authority? To me, a non-lawyer, I think this is some type of stolen valor. This person claims some type of authority to make “orders” and if they don’t actually possess that power….well, I see that as an ethics violation. I do believe this person probably meant to write “I/We hearby demand…” which is much different.
This is supposed to be a cease and desist demand – but my god is the demand vague. You want another person to not be able to speak or address a specific group of people? That’s unethical given how overbroad it is. (My opinion.)
“Reply within 10 days” – the reply should be “Bite me.”